ORMER
Israeli President Shimon
Peres was seated next to Google chairman
Eric Schmidt. There
they were, at an Anti-Defamation League dinner, September 2014
at the Mandarin Oriental in New York, where national chairman
Abraham Foxman
(since retired) celebrated their outstanding achievements.

Peres, who singularly guided the startup nation to become one of
the world’s most technically inventive incubators—second only to
Silicon Valley—was brainstorming with software engineer Schmidt.
No surprise, seeing how Peres, long an advocate of
nanotechnology, had set up a foundation to explore the human
brain.

Now, after an eight-year term as president of Israel, Peres is
looking for his next job. At 91 he’s
still sharp as a tack.

His granddaughter, screenwriter/actress
Mika Almog,
introduced a light-hearted video she produced showing Peres in
quest of new opportunities. At the unemployment bureau, he’s
asked about his experience.

“I built RAFAEL.” That expensive restaurant in Tel Aviv? “No, RAFAEL, advanced defense systems for…”
So, you have no experience.

Dejected, Peres tries his hand at various jobs that don’t
require experience, such as pizza delivery and service station
attendant, and bombs every time.

As a supermarket cashier, he announces the day’s special, which
turns out to be the story of Special Operation Entebbe.

As a security guard he asks, “Are you armed? Sniper? Ballistic
missile?” The answer is no each time, and he responds,
“Excellent. The intellect is our finest weapon.”

As a nightclub standup, he opens with, “You know how you build a
textile factory in the Negev and everyone thinks it’s something
else?”

Silence.

“Anyone here from Dimona?”

Sullen faces stare back at him.

He taps the microphone. “Is this on?”

The fearless nonagenarian finally finds his calling as a
skydiving coach. Skydiving?

“This is the man who taught me how to swim,” Mika his
granddaughter explained. “I thought I’d return the favor and
teach him how to fly.”

At the ADL awards dinner Peres spoke about the miracle of a
people who, despite antisemitism and persecution through the
ages and attempts by current Arab armies to destroy it, has
survived.

“Out of communism was born the mighty Soviet Union, the great
communist party. Out of Judaism was born a tiny little movement.
But look what happened to communism and look what happened to
Zionism. They started big, and lost. We started
small, and won.”

The reason we won, he added, was because we have two armies: a
moral army led by ADL with Abe Foxman as the commander, and a
real army with soldiers, who just went through a very demanding,
very difficult war against terror” [the Gaza campaign to destroy
the terror tunnels).

The greatest victory, he
said, will be peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

In presenting Schmidt with an ADL International Leadership
Award, Foxman pointed out that on a recent visit to Israel
Schmidt described it as a “tech miracle” in which Google has
important partnerships and intends to expand its investments.

“Eric may be the largest individual investor in Israeli tech,”
Foxman declared.

Schmidt said that pursuing hate, which is ADL’s mandate, has
been made easier with the invention of the Internet.

“The Internet is the best thing ever invented to combat
prejudice,” he said.

“The enemy of prejudice is critical thinking. Hate thrives in
isolation but now that we are all connected it will never be
possible for someone to spew out falsehoods at the level that
have built the kind of hatred that ADL has been fighting for 100
years. People will detect it and fix it with shame and
education.”

For the first time, Schmidt said, we can see everything. “We’ll
do whatever it takes to make sure that ‘Never Again’ is true
universally for everyone. If you’re prejudiced, we’re going to
find out. We’re going to know. Fabrications, these lies, which
are ridiculous, but ultimately hurtful and bad, can be revealed.
We can identify these hate mongers.”